This book is the first compendium on the development of the computer in Russia to appear in the West. After briefly illuminating the history of Russian mechanical calculation devices, the book largely focuses on the first generations of (military and civilian) electronic computers, most of which were developed in the Soviet Union during the "Space-Race" and the Cold War, simultaneously with similarly fundamental developments in computing in the U.S.A. The reader is introduced to computers and cybernetics from mathematical, technical, social and cultural perspectives through archive material and through texts by some of the preeminent veterans of Russian computing (historians, engineers, military historians).

This book contains a collection of thoroughly refereed papers derived from the First IFIP WG 9.7 Conference on Soviet and Russian Computing, held in Petrozavodsk, Russia, in July 2006. The 32 revised papers were carefully selected from numerous submissions; many of them were translated from Russian. They reflect much of the shining history of computing activities within the former Soviet Union from its origins in the 1950s with the first computers used for military decision-making problems up to the modern period where Russian ICT grew substantially, especially in the field of custom-made programming.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 16th International Computer Science Symposium in Russia, CSR 2021, held in Sochi, Russia, in June/July 2021. The 28 full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 68 submissions. The papers cover a broad range of topics, such as formal languages and automata theory, geometry and discrete structures; theory and algorithms for application domains and much more.

This book constitutes the refereed post-conference proceedings of the 7th Russian Supercomputing Days, RuSCDays 2021, held in Moscow, Russia, in September 2021. The 37 revised full papers and 3 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 99 submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: supercomputer simulation; HPC, BigData, AI: architectures, technologies, tools; and distributed and cloud computing.

Explains the Soviet Union's struggle with the development & application of computers in Soviet society. Addresses Russian traditions (history of the Russian people frustrates attempts to apply computer power); the Soviet system (it works against development & use of computers); hardware & software, education (how Soviets meet the problems of developing a computer literate society); & prospects of the Soviets trailing behind the West. Illustrations, figures, photos, & tables.

While Russian computer scientists are notorious for their interference in the 2016 US presidential election, they are ubiquitous on Wall Street and coveted by international IT firms and often perceive themselves as the present manifestation of the past glory of Soviet scientific prowess. Drawing on over three hundred in-depth interviews, the contributors to From Russia with Code trace the practices, education, careers, networks, migrations, and lives of Russian IT professionals at home and abroad, showing how they function as key figures in the tense political and ideological environment of technological innovation in post-Soviet Russia. Among other topics, they analyze coders' creation of both transnational communities and local networks of political activists; Moscow's use of IT funding to control peripheral regions; brain drain and the experiences of coders living abroad in the United Kingdom, United States, Israel, and Finland; and the possible meanings of Russian computing systems in a heterogeneous nation and industry. Highlighting the centrality of computer scientists to post-Soviet economic mobilization in Russia, the contributors offer new insights into the difficulties through which a new entrepreneurial culture emerges in a rapidly changing world. Contributors. Irina Antoschyuk, Mario Biagioli, Ksenia Ermoshina, Marina Fedorova, Andrey Indukaev, Alina Kontareva, Diana Kurkovsky, Vincent Lépinay, Alexandra Masalskaya, Daria Savchenko, Liubava Shatokhina, Alexandra Simonova, Ksenia Tatarchenko, Zinaida Vasilyeva, Dimitrii Zhikharevich

How, despite thirty years of effort, Soviet attempts to build a national computer network were undone by socialists who seemed to behave like capitalists. Between 1959 and 1989, Soviet scientists and officials made numerous attempts to network their nation—to construct a nationwide computer network. None of these attempts succeeded, and the enterprise had been abandoned by the time the Soviet Union fell apart. Meanwhile, ARPANET, the American precursor to the Internet, went online in 1969. Why did the Soviet network, with top-level scientists and patriotic incentives, fail while the American network succeeded? In How Not to Network a Nation, Benjamin Peters reverses the usual cold war dualities and argues that the American ARPANET took shape thanks to well-managed state subsidies and collaborative research environments and the Soviet network projects stumbled because of unregulated competition among self-interested institutions, bureaucrats, and others. The capitalists behaved like socialists while the socialists behaved like capitalists. After examining the midcentury rise of cybernetics, the science of self-governing systems, and the emergence in the Soviet Union of economic cybernetics, Peters complicates this uneasy role reversal while chronicling the various Soviet attempts to build a “unified information network.” Drawing on previously unknown archival and historical materials, he focuses on the final, and most ambitious of these projects, the All-State Automated System of Management (OGAS), and its principal promoter, Viktor M. Glushkov. Peters describes the rise and fall of OGAS—its theoretical and practical reach, its vision of a national economy managed by network, the bureaucratic obstacles it encountered, and the institutional stalemate that killed it. Finally, he considers the implications of the Soviet experience for today's networked world.